1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to systems for presenting information to users in a manner which aids the user in selecting from among alternatives and more specifically to interactive systems which aid investors in selecting investments that best meet the investor's requirements.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of networked computing, and of the Internet in particular, has made life both easier and more difficult for the investor. Life has become easier because it is easier than ever before to find and retrieve the data that is needed to make wise investment decisions and to manipulate the data once it has been retrieved. Life has become harder because the very plethora of data and the number of ways of manipulating it complicate the process of turning the data into the information the investor needs: namely, information which permits the investor to choose wisely among alternative investment possibilities.
The bases upon which a wise investor chooses his or her investments are return, risk, and diversity. The investor wants investments which offer a relatively good return at a relatively low risk and further wants diversity among the risks that his investments are exposed to, so that circumstances which produce a loss on one investment do not produce losses on others of the investments. Thus, what the investor needs to choose wisely is a way of looking at data about individual investment possibilities which reveals the following for each investment of interest with regard to a period of time:                the overall return yielded by the investment over the period as compared to a benchmark of interest;        the volatility of the investment over the period, which provides a measure of its risk; and        the resiliency of the investment with regard to market shocks over the period.        
What an investor is of course looking for is investments which maximize return and resiliency while minimizing volatility.
Once the investor has found a number of investments of interest, the investor needs to look at groups of the possible investments to see how investments in the group relate to each other from the point of view of diversity of risk. Diversity of risk measures the degree to which the risks that affect the value of one investment are independent of the risks that affect another investment. In general, the greater the diversity of risk in a set of investments, the more secure the value of the entire set of investments is.
What is needed is a single easy-to-use tool which provides the above information to the investor and provides it in a fashion which makes it easy for the investor to compare the risks and returns of individual investment possibilities and to see how the investment possibilities relate to each other with regard to diversity of risk. It is an object of the invention disclosed herein to provide such a tool.